Helmut Newton: Work

AMAZONS AND STARS IMMORTALIZED BY THE MASTER OF PHOTOGRAPHIC PROVOCATION

Turning 80 is not so bad when the occasion is marked by a sweeping retrospective of your life's work. An exhibition of 300 Helmut Newton photographs, curated by June Newton and TASCHEN editor Manfred Heiting, opened on October 30th, 2000 at the National Gallery in Berlin. TASCHEN is proud to bring you HELMUT NEWTON - WORK, the catalog of the exhibition. WORK features for the first time all aspects of Newton’s oeuvre: carefully selected fashion and advertising photographs, nudes, portraits, montages and experiments. All together, photographs that span Newton's entire career as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century.

Embracing without reservation the somewhat menacing sexuality of strong women, Newton’s work has a history of creating extreme discomfort – even outrage - in the viewer. Legs apart, breasts exposed or girded in erotically charged undergarments, these über-women stare the viewer down and dare him or her to approach. Even in the notorious shot of a model wearing both riding boots and a saddle, Newton’s women truly own their sexuality and that is a threatening stance to many. Knowing this about his work, celebrities allow themselves a more blatantly sexual persona in front of his camera than they might for any other photographer resulting in truly astonishing images of Sigourney Weaver, Catherine Deneuve, Elisabeth Shue and others.

WORK is the perfect book for those who coveted TASCHEN’s record-breaking book of Newton’s work, SUMO, but who could not meet its $1500 price. WORK is SUMO for the rest of us!

THE EDITOR: Manfred Heiting is an internationally renowned expert in and collector of photography. A resident of Amsterdam and Los Angeles, Mr. Heiting is a board member of the German Photographic Society, the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ) and the August Sander Archive (Cologne). He is also the chairman of the National Collection Commission at the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) and in 1999 was appointed project director of the German Center of Photography in Berlin.

THE AUTHOR: Françoise Marquet established the photo department at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1981 organizing retrospectives and acquiring the works of Duane Michals, Herbert List, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Helmut Newton, Jeanloup Sieff, Jan Saudek, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. In 1997 Ms. Marquet was appointed to the Petit Palais Musée des Beaux-Arts where she is setting up a photographic department, coordinating exhibitions that will tour during major renovations scheduled at the Petit Palais, and organizing major exhibitions at the museum once the work is completed.